~ Our Little Piece of Heaven – Notre petit bout de paradis

Dear Readers, please click on “Blog in English”, located in the left-hand sidebar, to display all my posts in English. If this is your first visit, please note that the most recentposts appear first, so click on “Older Posts” at the bottom of each page until you get to the beginning. P.S. I translate this blog into French so as to share my experience and thoughts with my mum who does not speak English.

I saved a few pallets from the fire claiming that I could transform them into something useful… some garden furniture, a bench, a table….I was not quite sure… Eventually, armed with a hand saw a few screws and a screwdriver, I built two planters. They will keep the rabbits away from my plants!

We spent one whole year having to walk around the back of the garage and through the work-shed to get inside the garage, but now we can get in quickly! Indeed, the garage door spring had snapped (and could not be replaced) making the door too heavy to lift. A great guilt-free way to get a new door🙂 Kids, you can now take the bikes out without going through an assault course!

Walls/Murs

Anecdote: the first picture was taken on 17th April 2014, exactly 2 years ago! Doo doo dooo doo doo doooo…

You have not heard from us for a long time…but yes, we are still here!

I would like to introduce to you our noisy neighbours. Last June, we were woken up by very noisy baby crows! This lasted for about two weeks, every morning between 4.30 and 5’oclock, and of course very near our bedroom window!!

Mum would bring her two babies to our bird feeder probably to try and teach them how to eat by themselves but all they wanted is for her to feed them.

Daddy would come and see them occasionally but, to the babies’ disappointment, rarely brought them any food.

Have a look at the video below and tell me how you would have reacted yourself!

Luckily for one of our neighbours (our neighbours are sheep!), we had spent a lot of time working in the garden! So, after hours and hours (or was it days???) of hearing the same lamb calling out in the field next door, I wondered if maybe a ewe had died and her lamb was crying for her. Well, we did find the carcass of a ewe in the river a few weeks earlier so it really was possible!

But in fact, it was a greedy lamb which got its head stuck in the fence while trying to reach for some grass on the other side. As you can see in the video below, we managed to free the lamb. And if I had kept filming, you would also have seen the lamb running up the hill yelling for his mum.

As some of you know already, our son got married on 24th July. Congratulations to the newly-weds and welcome to our family, Emma!

This big event gave us the strength and courage we needed to push our renovation work a bit harder and a bit quicker as we wanted to welcome our family somewhere dust and dirt free. We even had time to dress up the bay window.

The floor in the front room was a nightmare. The self-levelling compound did not self- level and only had about 10 minutes working time. Result: one floor like a sea with 7-10 knot wind speed and one woman in tears … and in a bad mood (yes, that was me, in case you were not sure!). Gordon told me to drop everything until the next day. It was good advice as things did not feel so bad the next day…

…even when our sander broke down half way through…

But the floor looks great now. We chose glue-down luxury vinyl flooring because it is only 2.5cm thick, meaning no step up into the room.

First, thank you Carly for your advice in the design of our bathroom. Erecting an alcove with a mirror above the toilet to disguise the fact that there is a wall in the middle of the room was a genius idea!

The opening between the wet room and the toilet area was made bigger using two wide angles instead of the ordinary 90-degree angle. That seemed a great idea until it was time to do the tiling…and then, the job became very tricky! The problem was solved using a round plastic trim.

Even after all these months of DIY, I still “make cheese” (do you remember the post I published one year ago about “making cheese”?!?). Trying to drill a hole on the curved edge of a tile was too ambitious/silly: the drill slipped into the grout and then, I also broke the head of the drill bit… grrr!

A few remaining pieces of slate from our new roof were used in a nick of time to save two families of birds from the beak of a spotted wood pecker. It made a hole on the side of the great tit’s house …

Still no light in the bathroom but at least, the plumbing is finished and we can now brush our teeth at the sink… The tiling is finished too. We only need to add a few accessories and the bathroom will soon be officially finished.

I received a special request regarding the progress of our pond. So, here you are. Started last July, this is Gordon’s project really, not mine. Something fun to get away from our DIY tasks. Not quite there yet though!